Written By: Dr. Dale Marsden, Founder & Chief Visionary
From Completion to Relevance: How Catapult Is Helping Schools Redefine Student Success
Tomorrow’s Talent is proud to partner with Catapult, a professional development (PD) platform helping educators rethink what student success should look like. Founded by Kevin Fleming, Catapult focuses on one big goal: making education more relevant, career connected and world ready for every student.
Schools are full of people who care deeply about students.
They are also full of initiatives, dashboards, improvement plans, graduate profiles, pathway programs, advisory committees, and professional development calendars. Yet even in committed systems, too many students still cross the graduation stage without a clear sense of who they are, where they are going, what the world expects of them, or how their education connects to life beyond school.
That tension is not a failure of educator commitment. It is a systems challenge.
For Dr. Kevin Fleming, founder of Catapult, the question became unavoidable after more than two decades in education. Kevin began teaching in 1999 and later served in roles including faculty member, dean, and college vice president. Like many education leaders, he once believed the next role, program, curriculum, or executive-level initiative might be the lever that changed the system.
But over time, he saw a familiar pattern. Leaders came and went. Strategic plans launched. New initiatives created momentum for a season. Then, slowly, institutions often drifted back toward the status quo.
“The problem I was trying to solve is how do you actually change school culture?” Kevin said.
Catapult was born from that question.
Not as another webinar platform. Not as a conference replacement. Not as a collection of motivational keynotes. Catapult is something more strategic: a professional learning model designed to help schools and colleges build the shared language, shared belief, peer support, and implementation capacity required for culture change.
That distinction matters because culture is often the missing infrastructure behind education reform. A district can invest in a promising program, adopt a new graduate profile, launch career pathways, or expand work-based learning. But if the adults across the system do not share the same understanding of why the work matters, how it connects to student outcomes, and what role they each play, even the best initiative can struggle to take root.
Catapult uses a simple metaphor: they fertilize the soil so new ideas can take root.
The point is not to prescribe one curriculum, one intervention, or one pathway model. The point is to prepare the institutional ground so that meaningful initiatives can grow. In Kevin’s words, the work begins with people: their mindset, their beliefs, their shared understanding, and their willingness to see student success differently.
That idea is grounded in research Catapult conducted in partnership with ACTE, from focus groups and surveys to literature reviews and case studies. One core insight was that systems do not necessarily need 51 percent of staff to shift before culture begins to move. They need a critical mass of influential people across roles who share an experience, language, and direction. That group might include administrators, counselors, teachers, union leaders, classified staff, longtime employees, or other trusted voices who shape how an institution actually operates.
In other words, change does not only move through titles. It moves through influence.
That is why Catapult’s model is intentionally collective. Each month, participating institutions engage with a cinematic Master Class from a respected education leader, speaker, or practitioner. But the learning does not stop with the video. Each Master Class includes an implementation playbook, opportunities for live fireside chats with speakers, a virtual community, and one-on-one just-in-time coaching. The design is built around steady cadence: one Master Class per month, 10 months per year.
“If the goal is to change mindsets, then you need a different approach than traditional professional development,” Kevin said.
That different approach also expands who gets access to high-quality learning. In many systems, conference attendance is limited to the same small group of leaders or staff members who have the budget, schedule, or title to go. Catapult challenges that pattern by making the message available across a district or institution.
That includes teachers and administrators, but also counselors, secretaries, instructional aides, nutrition staff, bus drivers, and other support professionals who interact with students every day. Kevin makes the point clearly: life-changing conversations do not only happen in classrooms or counseling offices. They also happen in hallways, front offices, lunch lines, parking lots, and buses. If those adults are part of the student experience, they deserve access to the ideas, language, and tools that help them guide students well.
For Tomorrow’s Talent, that belief is deeply familiar.
Dale Marsden, founder of Tomorrow’s Talent, recently contributed his Catapult Master Class, “Hope for Tomorrow’s Talent.” His message fits naturally within Catapult’s larger mission because it begins with a simple but transformative premise: hope is the first mile marker on the road to success.
In Dale’s framing, students need more than encouragement. They need adults and systems that answer, through action, a question many young people are quietly asking: Do you believe in me? Real hope requires goals, pathways, and agency. It requires learning that connects to the real world. It requires experiences that help students see themselves in the future before they are expected to choose it.
That is where the alignment between Catapult and Tomorrow’s Talent becomes clear. Catapult works on the professional learning and culture side of the equation, helping education systems build shared belief and direction. Tomorrow’s Talent works as an intermediary between education, employers, and community partners, helping young people access career awareness, work-based learning, internships, and pathways that make the future tangible.
Both efforts point toward the same conclusion: the classroom and the career cannot be treated as separate worlds.
Kevin argues that education must also rethink what it considers student success. Enrollment, retention, graduation rates, college-going rates, and dropout reduction all matter. But they are not enough. A student can be “successful” by those measures and still leave school directionless, underprepared, disconnected from opportunity, and unsure how to translate education into a meaningful next step.
“We pretended that graduation was the finish line,” Kevin said. “And it’s a milestone, I believe, but it’s not the finish line.”
That shift from completion to readiness is at the heart of Catapult’s work. Kevin and the Catapult Team believe schools should ask whether students graduate with confidence in who they are, clarity about where they are going, and a competitive advantage to get there. Those three ideas; confidence, clarity, and competitive advantage; offer a more complete lens for K–12 leaders who are serious about preparing students for life after graduation.
“We need to evolve the metric from completion to relevancy,” Kevin said.
Relevancy does not mean abandoning academic excellence. It means placing academic learning inside a broader framework of purpose. It asks whether students understand how their education connects to their interests, strengths, future options, and the world they are preparing to enter. It asks whether the system is designed around the real outcomes students need, not only the legacy measures institutions have traditionally tracked.
For district leaders, that can feel like an ambitious charge. Kevin is clear that the answer is not always to jump immediately to the largest possible intervention. A district does not need to begin by launching a full apprenticeship program if the culture, staffing, employer relationships, or community understanding are not yet ready. The next right step might be advisory boards, mentorships, mock interviews, informational interviews, job shadows, or other work-based learning experiences that move the system forward at a pace it can sustain.
“You change culture incrementally, one step at a time,” Kevin said.
That is one reason Catapult is designed as a multi-year model. Culture rarely changes after a single keynote, a single training day, or a single initiative launch. It changes when a consistent message becomes shared language, when shared language becomes common practice, and when common practice becomes part of how an institution defines its work.
Kevin said one sign of progress is when an “unusual suspect” starts using the language. When someone like an AP English teacher, a longtime staff member, or someone outside the traditional career readiness conversation begins talking about workforce development, social capital, or relevance, the work is no longer isolated to a department or program. It is becoming part of the culture.
That is the promise of Catapult’s model. It helps move professional learning from inspiration to implementation, from information to shared action, and from individual enthusiasm to collective momentum.
Students are entering a world that is changing faster than many school systems were designed to respond. Artificial intelligence, shifting labor markets, rising expectations for experience, and changing definitions of career readiness are already reshaping what young people need from education.
Catapult’s work matters because it recognizes that schools cannot meet that moment through programs alone. They need culture. They need shared language. They need educators and support staff who see relevance as part of everyone’s role. They need systems that measure not only whether students complete school, but whether they leave prepared for the world beyond it.
That is where Catapult and Tomorrow’s Talent stand on common ground. Both are working toward an education ecosystem where students are not simply moved through a system, but equipped with hope, experience, direction, and real opportunity.
As Kevin put it, Catapult is focused on helping students become “world ready, not just college or career ready.”
For leaders who are serious about changing outcomes, that may be the next frontier of professional learning: not another initiative layered onto the system, but a sustained strategy for changing the soil beneath it.